A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I want to set up a home server and take advantage of everything it can offer, specialty privacy.
Raspberry PI, no matter the version, are all quite expensive here in Brazil, so that's off the table. I'll go for a regular desktop. But the the requirements for a server that "does it all" remains a mystery to me.
What specs do you guys recommend?
A repurposed old PC with something like yunohost, generic Debian, or some lightweight Linux will probably get you what you need.
It heavily depends on what programs you want to run.
The one you already have and/or if a raspberry pi 2 (all) can do it…. So can you. It’s not a game, you don’t need a RTX 9090Ti Super Omega Beta Pizza to run it.
Rather than give you specific recommendations, here's some guidance for parts
Mobo: The more slots you have for RAM and storage, the better.
CPU: literally anything. More cores and faster cores are ideal, but CPU requirements for these things are generally lower than a desktop.
RAM: Buy 1 stick of the fastest and highest capacity RAM your motherboard can handle. When you're ready or you start to see slowdown, buy another of the same stick. You can get far on 16-32GB, you won't need much more until later.
Storage: an SSD for the OS and one or more HDDs for storage.
PSU: generally anything in the 500-700 range will be good. You'll want more if you plan to put a GPU in, though.
That very much depends on what you want it to do (what is "everything") and how many users you have.
Why would raspberry pi's be expensive but the hardware to build a server be any cheaper?
Scalpers for highly sought-after hardware or just general lack of supply in specific regions.
I live in Brazil too and bought a R$120 old HP computer running Windows XP on MercadoLivre. Works decently enough for a Minecraft server after an upgrade (4 to 8GB of RAM). Old computers are great for price and they're good if you can upgrade them.
For general purposes, get something better than what I bought since it is not the fastest (even though it runs the Minecraft server software alright, it still lags). Maybe upgrading with an SSD would help performance.
I run about thirty services off of an old Dell workstation that I “acquired” from my last corporate job. That includes a full Servarr stack. I’m pretty sure whatever you have will probably do the trick.
A CPU that can run Linux along with some networking
Literally any old PC is likely fine. It may be slow, it may struggle or even fail with some of the very complex software (perhaps you will encounter timeouts, or you will spend so much time waiting for memory to swap in or out to disk that it won't be worth using) but you can run Linux itself on a potato and if your machine isn't powerful enough, maybe you can get a second one and run different stuff on each, or just scale down your expectations and don't try to self-host LITERALLY everything just because you can. Certain services are very intense, others will run on a very small piece of a potato.
A raspberry pi 4 or 5 and some fast USB 3 hard drives.